SCREENING LOG - 9/26-10/2/2005

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Yoji Yamada, director of HIDDEN BLADE:

l to r: actress Camille Berthomier, inept translator, director Jean-Paul Civeyrac and Film Comment editor Kent Jones at Q&A for THROUGH THE FOREST

A closer look at Camille Berthomier:

director Park Chan-wook and New York Film Festival Director Richard Pena:

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005, Martin Scorsese)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367555
yes bordering on mixed

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002, George Clooney)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290538
mixed

From the 2005 New York Film Festival:

I Am (2005, Dorota Kedzierzawska)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478175/
aka MOUCHETTE FOR DUMMIES. To be fair, this film is modeled more closely on Truffaut’s 400 BLOWS, except that it focuses more on that films’ weaknesses (sentimentality and unapologetically one-sided identification with the suffering innocent) than its strengths (a vivid rendering of the social forces that produce childhood alienation). This chronicle of a Polish boy’s derelict life after running away from boarding school and being shunned by his slutty mom is as upbeat a depiction of prepubescent misery as one could imagine, thanks to a charismatic performance by the lead and a horribly incessant soundtrack that, combined with some cutesy romantic interludes and intermittent comic relief, never lets the audience fall too deeply into despair, much less reflection. The sole poetic moment involves a woman drying her tears with a blow-drier. Expect this to infest an art cinema near you sometime next year.
mixed

Through the Forest (2005, Jean-Paul Civeyrac)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477404/
Wong Kar-who? The most swoon-worthy film I’ve seen all year is this short but deliriously intense romantic tour de force, shot on a shoestring budget whose limited means enables its cinematic brilliance to blossom. Jean-Paul Civeyrac takes a simple, B-movie premise of Armelle, a young girl haunted by her lover’s death, and winds it into ten of the most stunningly choreographed long takes executed in recent memory. Through a series of mostly interior sets, the camera’s gaze stays invariably tight, whether poring over Armelle’s mournful expressions or exploring every floridly colored inch of the interiors – combined with the subtle, supernatural shifts in lighting and tone, each scene seems to unfold into two or three. In retrospect, perhaps the dizzying aestheticism of the film diverts attention from the decidedly film-schoolish treatment of emotion, death and grieving – Civeyrac, a film school teacher, is over 40, but the film feels like it was injected with the hormones of an unstable adolescent, tapped directly into a range of simple, uncluttered emotions, whether the thrill of lust or the chill of death (it’s been a while since my palms sweated like a nervous prom date while watching a movie). Much of that effect is due to the key cast member, a hereto-unknown named Camille Berthomier, who also writes and sings a couple goofy songs a la Jacques Demy. Under Civeyrac’s infatuated direction, this first time actress is rendered emotionally and physically naked – not even Anna Karina had to go through so much under Godard. But I’ll be damned if she doesn’t come out of this the hottest actress in all of Europe.
YES (#3 for new films seen in 2005 between THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU and THE SHAPE OF THE MOON)

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005, Avi Mograbi)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0459934/
A structurally intriguing documentary that tries to fathom the Israeli soul and its longstanding hatred of its enemies – who, the movie seems to argue, exist out of necessity more than anything else. The film alternates between three narrative modes: first there is footage of Jews from all over the world visiting key historical sites, where they are indoctrinated by zealous tour guides in the glories of a mythic past, an endangered nation and eternal martyrdom. These recollections of Jewish victimization are juxtaposed with Israeli border guards harassing Palestinians in the Occupied Zone, and it doesn’t take much to see where Mograbi is going with the comparison. Lastly there are static takes of Mograbi’s long (and boring) phone conversations with a Palestinian friend about the future of their shared dilemma, one that seems rooted in a cultural hatred so deep as to be irresolvable. Mograbi offers a number of fresh views on a longstanding situation, and though I welcome his righteous indignation at his fellow Israelis, I can’t help wishing it would do more than point out the error of his own people’s ways. The most intriguing sequence involves a bunch of dread-locked Israeli Rastafarians puffing on blunts as they recall the glories of Samson killing a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. If Mograbi had dug a little deeper with oddballs like that, we might really get somewhere new with these old grievances.
yes

Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005, Peter Tscherkassky)
not listed on IMDb
The most impressive entry among the two avant-garde programs I attended at the NYFF was this, the newest film by Peter Tscherkassky, one of the preeminent figures of contemporary experimental cinema. The only other film I’ve seen of his is OUTER SPACE, an avant-garde horror movie that takes footage from the cheesy 80s supernatural rape flick THE HAUNTING and transforms it into something truly chilling by literally taking the celluloid upon which the film is printed and tearing it to shreds, as if to get at the material heart of cinematic horror. He attempts something similar here with the Western ethos of wilderness and violence, using no less iconic a source material as Leone’s THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Tscherkassky focuses his found footage more on Eli Wallach than on Eastwood, probably because he likes how Wallach resembles a cockroach, as the image of his face crawls through a ragged, scraped, bleached black-and-white revision of Leone’s Western apocalypse, reduced to glinty stares, gunfights and graveyards.
yes (#11 for new films seen in 2005 between 2046 and SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE)

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005, Park Chan-wook)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0451094
The fourth feature by Park Chan-wook is his first with a female protagonist – who knows whether it’s because he finally wanted to address the charges of misogyny directed at his previous films, or if he was paying tribute to the 4th film by Quentin Tarantino, who so lavished praise on Park’s OLDBOY at last year’s Cannes Festival. In any event, this film blows both volumes of KILL BILL out of the cinematic water, by demonstrating twice as much originality and inventiveness in half the runtime. From the graceful yet ominous credit sequence, Park’s imagination is even more agile than in OLDBOY, as he takes the viewer through an elaborate series of flashbacks that draw us closer-by-the-inch to the mysterious machinations of Lee Geum-ja, who proves to be one mother of an avenging angel. Played by Lee Yeoung-ae, in a role most actresses would kill for, Geum-ja manages to be both a sweet-faced servant of compassion and a ruthless ass-kicking bitch, sometimes simultaneously – this character’s morality has more sinuous curves than a hypothetical love scene between Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson. The same can be said for Park’s handling of story and mood, which, while at times dubious in the way he treats themes of rape, child abuse and capital punishment with more flippancy than anyone else could (or should) get away with, is never predictable in the least. He ranges from crude comic relief to gory slapstick to heart-rending pathos to all of the above. I admit to missing the less flashy and more soberly emotional devastation of his early films, so I may have to see this again to determine how much of this is gratuitous showmanship, versus how much its schizophrenic style truly reflects the paradoxical human impulses of love and hate that it dares to examine. Whatever the case, there is no question that this is the work of a major filmmaker churning fearlessly through uncharted waters.
yes (#12 for new films seen in 2005 between INSTRUCTIONS FOR A LIGHT AND SOUND MACHINE and TONY TAKITANI)

From the NYFF Shochiku tribute:

Our Neighbor Miss Yae (1934, Yasujiro Shimazu)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160994
YES (#8 for 1934 between ANGELE and MAN OF ARAN)

The Neighbor's Wife and Mine (1931, Heinosuke Gosho)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022105
yes (#10 for 1931 between A NOUS LA LIBERTE and THE LADY AND THE BEARD)

Every Night Dreams (1933, Mikio Naruse)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024793
YES (#7 for 1933 between KING KONG and GOLDDIGGERS OF 1933)

Star Athlete (1937, Hiroshi "3 masterpieces out of 4 still ain't bad" Shimizu)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160345/
yes

From the San Diego Asian Film Festival:

What's Wrong with Frank Chin? (2005, Curtis Choy)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468963
yes (#17 for new films seen in 2005 between THE GRACE LEE PROJECT and THE MOTEL)

The Grace Lee Project (2005, Grace Lee)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0451070
yes (#16 for new films seen in 2005 between TURTLES CAN FLY and THE MOTEL)

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